Trust me: they're nice shoes. a lot of nice shoes. When the teenage antiheroes of The Bling Ring (in limited release June 14, nationwide June 21) first see the shoes--which, in the film and in real life, belong to Paris Hilton, into whose home they've broken--their gasps make sense. They're also mostly spontaneous. Sofia Coppola, who directed and wrote the movie based on the true tale of California kids on a celebrity-burglary spree, didn't let her actors examine Hilton's closet before the cameras were rolling. The result is a moment of shock and awe and, most of all, desire.
"I tried to shoot it in a seductive way, so you saw the allure of these things that they were after," says Coppola. "It's definitely over the top, but I wanted it to be like a candy store--this pretty, colorful stuff."
Coppola adheres to this candy-store ethos throughout The Bling Ring. Her camera acts like a host on QVC, showcasing the glittery trappings of wealth. To compare the film to an infomercial is to do it a disservice, but Coppola says viewers, like her characters, are indeed meant to crave all they see.
This shared, impulsive desire is what makes Coppola's criminals so believable. It's also what ties The Bling Ring to a number of this season's films, chiefly Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. While their story lines (Jazz Age seduction, college crime fantasia) couldn't be more different, their visions are united by long, loving looks at stuff, from vintage Tiffany hat pins and celebrity-branded perfume to Hermès handbags, golden bullets and strands of pearls long enough to loop around a neck so many times, you lose count.
Did you find yourself longing for Jay Gatsby's monogrammed floors, his gleaming car, his wardrobe? Luhrmann says that was the point. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald's hero tries to prove his worth to Daisy via a display à la Cribs, MTV's celebrity-house-tour franchise, Luhrmann says he had to capture Gatsby's belief in stuff's power. For the climax of his demonstration, as Gatsby showers Daisy with beautiful button-downs, that meant creating a "psychedelic snowstorm of shirts."
"Every detail in that house is about him saying, 'Look how rich I am. I am worthy because I have all this stuff,'" Luhrmann says. "We want the audience to go, Look at all of the stuff!" Coppola's mission was much the same: "The whole story I tried to experience with the kids, to get in their minds why they did this, so the audience experiences it with them." Her camera had to love stuff as much as her thieves do.
These aren't the first characters defined by possessions, nor are these the first films to lovingly frame belongings. What's new is the palpable electricity of the reveal. Consider 1995's Clueless, which featured a closet just as extreme as Hilton's but presented as more ridiculous than desirable. Wes Anderson's films are meticulous about objects, but for their aesthetic or sentimental, not monetary, value. Citizen Kane focuses on a man who achieves class status as he acquires stuff--yet the takeaway isn't exactly that Xanadu is full of great decorating ideas.